The day before the dedication, school kids planted native grasses and flowers around the edge of a recreated pond in the center of what used to be the parking lot.
Click for larger photo.

Photo: Mary Losure

Residents of the Phalen neighborhood on the east side of Saint Paul are celebrating a redevelopment project believed to be the first of its kind in the nation. They're dedicating what used to be a shopping mall. Now, it's being restored as a wetland.

SIX YEARS AGO, the Phalen Village Shopping Center was a vast cracked parking lot and a nearly vacant strip mall. It was built on top what was once called Ames Lake. The basements in the stores flooded, the sidewalks buckled from the boggy ground underneath, and cattails sprouted from the asphalt.

The run down mall was an obstacle for local groups trying to revitalize the neighborhood's hard-pressed economy. They decided to tear it down, and bring back the wetland.

The day before the dedication, school kids planted native grasses and flowers around the edge of a recreated pond in the center of what used to be the parking lot.
Curt Millburn of the redevelopment group the Phalen Corridor Initiative strode through taking videos. "When they first dug this up to reclaim the wetland, the water seeped in, the first 10 minutes the shovels were in the ground," says Millburn. "It was so exciting to see this come back."

Restoring a wetland isn't a quiet business. A worker with what looks like an oversized power drill bores holes in the earth
for native flower seedlings. Others spray bright green foam over ground newly-seeded with native grass.

The restoration still has a long way to go. Most of the soil is still bare. A low wall of black plastic sheeting surrounds the restored pond.

Marian Seabold, 83, remembers what the area used to look like, when she was a girl.
"This was all trees, wetland, and this small lake," she recalls. "That street wasn't there. I used to shortcut through the woods to go down in Lake Phalen and go swimming. Then I moved away, got married and came back, and then one day bulldozers came in, they tore up all the trees, they pushed the hill down into the lake and wetland, and they built a shopping mall on it."

The restoration still has a long way to go. Most of the soil is still bare. A low wall of black plastic sheeting surrounds the restored pond.
Click for larger photo.

Photo: Mary Losure

Now Seabold is one of the volunteers helping replant the area. They've been working with schoolchildren like 11-year-old Theresa Trinh. She's out with her class from a nearby elementary school. "We're going to plant, and before we picked up a lot of trash and now it's a lot better," she says. "I think its great. I think if we have more people to help us, then I really think its going to be a big success and then just by seeing all the ducks and geese flying around and I think they feel safe enough to live around here."

The decaying mall had a reputation as a hang out for drug dealers. When Tony Reiger-Bore of North American Prairies got the city contract to seed the area with native prairie plants, he worried that the restored area would be vandalized. Shopping carts from a nearby supermarket have been dumped in the pond, and graffiti has defaced the newly-built pier.

But Reiger-Borer says he's been overwhelmed by the community's support. When a neighborhood group called offering volunteers to help with the planting, Reiger-Borer expected a few people to show up at the organizing meeting. Instead, the room was packed.

"I was totally impressed," Reiger Bore says. "A lot of them had never met each other before, and they were planning this thing out, figuring out, 'Ok, we can do this day, you can do that day, we can get grants for busses.' I sat back and went, 'Wow!' I had no idea this was going to make such a big impression on them, this place,and it was so important to them."

Already, the project appears to be a success as a redevelopment tool. A state office building and senior citizen apartments will be built nearby. The first, fastest growing prairie flowers should be blooming by this summer, with a parade of others in coming years.